At a time when 18 year olds enter Duke declaring they will be not just doctors or businessmen, but cardiothoracic surgeons and hedge fund equity wealth managers, George McLendon is a true Renaissance man.
In the past year, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences has taught a semester of intro Chem, run his own laboratory, traversed the country to stump for the financial aid initiative, cheered with the Crazies in Cameron, worked to cut down a million-dollar deficit in the face of rising costs--and is again on track to lure nearly a dozen more star faculty to Durham.
McLendon, who says he gets weekly offers to be president at other universities, says Duke was holding itself back before his arrival two years ago in going after the professors it wanted.
"Duke sells itself," McLendon insists, downplaying his role in an unapologetically competitive approach to faculty hiring.
"We seem to be picking on Penn a lot," he says halfway through surveying a list of incoming faculty hires. "According to U.S. News they're number four, we're number five."
He pauses and smiles. "We'll switch that."
But the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences is equally realistic about the University's resources and what it needs to not just keep up with, but surpass, its peers.
"We don't have the same kinds of resources that Harvard or Princeton do-we just don't," he says. "They can do everything the way they've always done it and do something new. So if we're going to be the very best at something we have to be a little bit more willing to take a risk."
Still, he does take a page out of Princeton's book, quoting Pete Caroll's mantra "the smart will always defeat the strong," and applying it to foster the ahead-of-the-curve intellectual community he wants to see at Duke, a "not terribly self-satisfied" institution that is willing to re-invent itself.
"We don't have to try and outspend them, we can't possibly win by outspending people like that," he says referring to the University's wealthier peers. "But we can be a lot more creative and a lot smarter."
Instead of seeing Duke play catchup to its neighbors in the North, McLendon sees it as an "aspirant model" for other schools.
"You don't need $30 billion to be like Duke," he says. "You just need to be really smart and really hardworking and really ambitions and really all those things that sound simple but really aren't."
So what has been the cost of such a busy year?
"I don't know what's happened on 24 this season," he admits. "It's really sad."
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